Water Music

     Lying on the v-berth, my ear to the pillow, I can hear the soft, tiny sound the water makes as it gentle strokes the spot where the hull meets the surface of the lake. It's something you might expect from snowflakes, acutely amplified, as they fall to the ground. A bubbling, dripping almost.

     That slight sound, taken together with the shimmering, dancing sunlight off the water as it paints the ceiling overhead with the afternoon, almost makes me feel like I've traveled, not just a few counties away, but back in time to The Lawrence Welk show with its champagne bubbles and twinkling, sequined outfits, glinting toward the camera. If I let it, the little sound becomes a xylophone under the mallet of a jazz master and if I don't, it's more like someone playing their cheek with the bowl of a spoon. Both "music" no doubt, but with very different venues and audiences.

     It's warm below and I have a very big fan keeping our little trapped piece of air moving. It reminds me of all those hot car rides back in the South, lying on the backseat somewhere between a Stuckey's and a peach orchard, praying that some day my Coke would come, while trying hard against the odds and the elements to take a nap. This was, of course, long before air conditioning came to our houses much less our cars. Back then all you could hope for was the wind as you tooled along and maybe the shade of a cloud every hundred or so miles. An afternoon shower request would just be getting greedy with God.

     My parents like to tell the story of me, very young and dying of thirst in the backseat on one such outing, suffering for the miles between the last Coke and the next, swearing that I was just not going to make it. Finally, after what must have seemed like years of waiting, I got my little sea glass green bottle of ice-cold soda, took a few sips, and fell sound asleep. They tried to softly wrestle the bottle from my hand as I drifted off without success. I had a "death grip" on it they'd say as they related the tale.

     I'm here relaxing through the heat of the day with my son, wondering what it is he'll remember, what markers he'll take with him from childhood into adult life. We take memory photographs we aren't even aware of, and how we choose what to keep, who really knows? So many images are just shiny shards of this and that, made into a collage that becomes a Cliff's Notes version we can pass along as our stories. Most of it's true, but perspective has a way of adding a new coat of paint to our portraits every now and again. And the farther we age away from our memories the more the art morphs from a vivid, primary-colored finger painting to a blurry watercolor of romanticism; the sort of pieces that hang in museums because they are visually pleasing and require very little concentration.

     My pretend xylophone is slowing a bit, seemingly coming to a new movement or maybe even arriving at the end of the piece. There's a harpish quality to it now, flowery translucent like those ancient watercolors. Like something soft and pleasing, happily trapped with nowhere else to go.